Professional

The ideal Councillor:

To me, professional means...

...having relevant knowledge, skills, and experience:

Candidates should have good understanding of both the facts, and issues relevant to Council, and also, if new to Council, they should have done their homework with regard to how the Council operates.

Ideally, they should, at the very least, have:

• familiarised themselves with recent Annual and Long-Term Plans, and recent Annual Reports.

• viewed recent Council meetings, and their respective agendas and minutes.

• spoken to experienced Councillors about the reality of the role.

• a clear understanding of the role of the Chief Executive.

Council is a large and complex organisation, operating in very dynamic environment, while trying to successfully balance the competing demands of many different 'stakeholder' groups, within a constrained fiscal envelope.

As such, I believe that the scale and complexity of the role of a Tauranga Councillor is an order of magnitude more demanding than serving on a school board, the board of a local sports club, or the board of a small NGO.

In my experience, many new Councillors, who don't have significant board or board-level experience, or who haven't done their 'homework', struggle to be effective for much of their first term, and, as a result, abdicate the power the community entrusted them with to colleagues, or worse, to the Council's senior management team.

I am certain neither of these serves the community well - nor justifies $500,000 income over the next four years.

...being committed:

If the remuneration doesn't make it obvious, there should be no doubt that being a Councillor is a full-time role, and being Mayor, an 'even more than full-time' role.

No Councillor will be effective in serving their community if they treat the role as less than full-time to accommodate other interests.

Another commitment that Councillors must make is one of ensuring that, even though all voices cannot sit at the Council table, all voices are heard at the Council table - and listened to respectfully, as hard as that may sometimes be.

...separating the personal from the political:

If the commitment to all the community's voices being heard at the Council table is honoured, there should be a diversity of views around a Council table - reflecting the diversity of views in the city.

This diversity will ensure that ideas and initiatives are properly scrutinised through real debate (something that has been glaringly absent during the reign of the Commission), and the dangers of 'group-think' (as evidenced in too many of the Commission's decisions) are avoided.

Sometimes an elected member will be on the losing side of such a debate.

A political loss should never be taken personally - to do so is simply unprofessional.